Belgium's Football Association can't take all credit for hype around current
squad, the Premier League has done much for their cause

In recent months, there has been much talk of a Belgian Football Association blueprint dating back to 2006 that has been responsible for the rebirth of Belgian football. Having lived for many years in the country, most of my adult life if the truth be known, I have serious reservations about how the FA could have implemented such a plan.

I feel it is stretching a point to expect that a country with six governments, six parliaments, three official languages and over 100 different beers could develop and implement a coherent plan that all professional clubs would follow and that would directly lead to the arrival of the current high-profile generation.

Thinking it must be more complex than that, I set out to ask local journalists, fans and coaches just exactly what has brought Marc Wilmots' squad to this juncture and what exactly does the team mean for the country’s oft-discussed future, if anything.

According to Francois Colin, previously football editor of Het Nieuwsblad and De Standaard and author of a definitive history of the national team - ‘De Rode Duivels 1900-2014’, talk of the FA being the main architect of Belgium’s revival is “b******s”!

Warming to his subject, Colin says that it’s impossible for any association to impose a playing style on a country’s clubs. Acknowledging that people such as Bob Browaeys, currently in charge of the Belgium U16 squad, are doing a good job at the Association, Coiln argues that a major factor has been the number of players leaving Belgium at an early age. Indeed, in the current squad, 13 of the 23 left Belgium while still teenagers and just under half have never played in the Belgian league.

I also spoke to Browaeys, and while he emphasises the value of the TopSports Schools initiative, attended by Axel Witsel and Eden Hazard among others, he also insists that the hardest part is the final step of bringing players into a club’s first team. Browaeys says that Ajax and Lille, where Jan Vertonghen, Thomas Vermaelen, Hazard and Kevin Mirallas all learnt their trade, have a culture of blooding young players at an early age.

In Belgium, Anderlecht, Standard Liege and Racing Genk have followed suit and all now have active youth policies – that’s essential in a country that cannot afford the salaries to attract top players.

Colin feels that due to the success of many players in Europe’s bigger leagues, Belgian clubs now believe that they can keep producing top players.

Another factor is the multicultural make-up of the squad. This is in sharp contrast to the last time that Belgium qualified for the World Cup finals, 2002, when only naturalised Croat Branko Strupar and Kinshasa-born Mbo Mpenza could be described as having roots in a different culture.

Colin wrote a piece back in 2006 saying that “the Belgian team is too white” and it’s apparent that Belgium has been some way behind France in introducing players from different ethnic backgrounds.

Now, with Vincent Kompany, Romelu Lukaku, Moussa Dembélé and many others, the team accurately reflects the country’s ethnicity.

As for the squad itself, John Baete, editor of Sports/Foot magazine for many years, stresses that Wilmots has done an excellent job in turning a group of talented players into a happy band of brothers. In that sense, he is carrying on the work started by Dick Advocaat, who introduced professionalism to the team’s management back in 2009.

As well as these factors, Baete feels that without an innate talent no player can succeed and that luck has also played a major part in the current generation coming together, a point also made by Kompany in his recent interview with the Guardian’s Amy Lawrence.

But whatever their roots and whatever journey they took to reach the national team, the current Diables Rouges/Rode Duivels have support on a national scale that has never been known before.

Colin feels this is due to the popularity of the Premier League where many of the squad ply their trade and also to the excellent marketing campaign in which fans were set a different challenge for each of the five home games in the qualifying rounds.

Colin contrasts this to 1980 when Belgium reached the European championships; in the following game, against Ireland, there were 11,000 fans at the Heysel. Now, each time the team plays in Brussels, the matches are sold out. Watching the squad train in Knokke ahead of the match with Tunisia, the screams heard when the players arrived on the pitch was rather like being – I would imagine - at a Take That concert.

The level of support across Belgium belies the profile of the country that was demonstrated in recent elections. With socialist-led coalitions declared in Wallonia and Brussels, a separate entity in its own right, and with a centre-right grouping in Flanders, talk of football uniting the country is somewhat premature. Talks continue with a view to forming a national government but it seems inevitable that Belgium will become a kind of confederation of these three states.

While in Knokke for the team’s final training camp before Brazil, I conducted a vox-pop poll along the sea-front. Hotel proprietor Sabine Schram said she was in favour of ‘one Belgium’ and thought football brought people together and made them happy at a time of economic crisis. Emmanuel (27) felt football was unifying the country and hoped the feeling would last. Greg (26) thought the whole thing was too commercialised and that any unifying effect would soon be forgotten; he added, worryingly, that “not all the players are Belgian”. I talked later to Pierre Bilic, a senior writer at Sports/Foot magazine, like Wilmots he is from Wallonia and married to a Flemish woman; he reasoned it would be sad if football was the only way to unite the country.

So what conclusions can be reached as Belgium approaches its first match at a World Cup tournament for 12 years?

Firstly, there‘s no single reason why this generation has come together at this time. In a country as complex as Belgium, that could never be the case. The country is moving inexorably towards becoming a loose confederation of states: Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia. The Belgian flag flies throughout the country today, but as Colin says, it’s just another football flag. It will be seen in great numbers when the team plays but the impact of the team on the country’s future will be negligible.

The most that the country can hope for is a repeat of the joyous scenes in the Grand Place/Grote Markt and in other cities across Belgium when the team reached the semi-finals back in 1986. And that will be reward enough for football fans throughout the land.